First Draft by Tim Porter

Invisible Management

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, in an interview with David Shaw of the L.A. Times, makes a good point about newsroom management: It should be invisible to readers. Writes Shaw:

He says he's "more of a delegator by nature and I don't want to step on the department heads' toes." Still, he knows that "everyday details are important, and you have to know enough of the details so that everyone realizes you're really involved in the process."

For him, that process began with replacing several department heads and beginning an overhaul of several sections in the paper.

"We've now gotten to the point where we can stop focusing on how the place is run and start focusing on what we're supposed to do — cover the news," he says. "Readers don't care whether the paper is run in a less authoritarian manner or if people are happier here now. They care whether the paper is doing a better job."

In other words, the internal workings of the paper -- the struggle between competition and collaboration, the production issues, the budget balancing, etc. -- mean nothing to the readers. Their interest is in the end result, and good management creates an environment and a process that focuses on that result in spite of the natural obstacles that arise in making a daily newspaper.

No one -- except for other butchers -- wants to see the sausage being made.

News Media Fights Back for Openness

The news media -- I should say the traditional news media -- is finally awakening to the realization that the current powers that be in Washington are intent on closing government to journalists.

Editor and Publisher reports that "press efforts to thwart government secrecy are moving forward on two fronts."

The first is an effort by the newspaper and wire bureau chiefs in Washington growing to unite their opposition to non-disclosure policies. Reports E&P;:

For Tom DeFrank, who began covering Washington as a Newsweek correspondent 36 years ago and now heads the New York Daily News bureau, the need for prying open government doors has never been greater. "This administration is the most aggressively unhelpful that I have ever covered, and that goes back to Nixon," he says. "This White House and administration are far more secretive than the Nixon crowd." (Emphsis added)

At issue is not just press freedom, but also the resulting level of information received by the public. "The real issue is telling our readers what it is they are not getting," says Vickie Walton-James, Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief.

To get a sense of how Bush administration legislation and policies have affected journalism for the worse since 9/11, read "The Lost Stories," a report by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. Here's a piece of the introduction:

The past two decades of journalism in the United States generated a collection of important stories that made significant changes to benefit the public interest. But reporting many of those stories would be difficult or impossible today because of greater restrictions on access to institutions, events and information. Whether by acts of Congress, new rules by federal agencies, decisions by courts, or even overreactions by administrators and bureaucrats, restrictions on access have led to a host of "lost stories" that are no longer informing the public about how its government works. (Emphasis added)

Tom Curley, president and CEO of the Associated Press, last month announced plans to create an "advocacy center for open government" in Washington that would lobby against restrictions on public information.

In the same speech, Curley said the AP also would make the following efforts:

 Conduct state FOI audits.
 Direct bureau chiefs to provide a status report on access for still and video cameras to state and federal courtrooms.
 Review procedures for responding when access to information or proceedings is blocked.
 Be sure that any news story that benefits from an FOI request or suffers from lack of public information that was refused by a government source says so clearly.

Newspapers at all levels should follow suit, especially in smaller communities. As an small-town journalist knows, local government and law enforcment is often the most recalcitrant in releasing information even when the law states clearly it should. The public has a right to know what it the government says it doesn't have a right to know.

Online News: 7 Lessons for the Future

Dan Froomkin, who writes the daily White House Briefing for Washingtonpost.com, writes for the Online Journalism Review and outlines seven things online news operations - most of which are still newspaper-based - can do to become "central players on the Internet."

 Integrate print and online: "It's time for a whole new round of serious conversations between online and print editors to get newsrooms to move to the next level and make exploiting the technological and journalistic possibilities of the Internet -- not just its news cycle -- a part of the newsroom culture," says Froomkin. He urges webby versions of print stories, URLs attached to stories, more multimedia and FAQs and backgrounders to deepen the context online.

This is absolutely right. Most newspaper web sites are little more than 1024 x 768 versions of the printed page - with wire feeds and archives added. At minimum, every staff-written story online should be loaded with links. Almost none are.

 Learn from blogs: "Consider if you were starting a "newspaper" today. Wouldn't you want to facilitate exchanges with readers? Wouldn't you want to encourage your readers to find out more than what you can publish? Wouldn't you want to make it easier for them to take action? Wouldn't you want to define and create a community? Wouldn't you want to make your readers feel important? Blog tools give you all that -- not to mention the ability to easily and quickly post something you just found out about. (What could be more journalistic?)"

Blogs enable newspapers to fulfill one of the Readership Institute's key mandates - connecting with readers and making the newspaper something they can "experience" and not just read.

 Get geographic: "The most compelling attraction for local users, of course, is something that only local newspapers have: extensive, accurate, very local information. Supplement that with genuine local voices, and you've got a lock on the market."

Froomkin says online content needs to be "geo-coded" so readers can get as local as they want for news, services or entertainment information.

 Serve the audience: "We need to aggressively and visibly use the best tools of print and Web journalism. Our best, most important work should feature compelling narratives, visual story-telling, interaction with the authors and newsmakers, and Web tools that encourage and harness citizen action. Don't just put a big serious thing out there in big fat text parts (with a few links and maybe a poorly captioned photo gallery) and expect to make a splash online."

When the online audience self-selects news, it heads toward what Froomkin identifies as the "zingy, scandalous, outrageous" content. That's the playing the field and serious journalism has to be presented in formats that can compete in that environment without undermining its importance.

 Better tools and support: "The dirty little secret of online is that you build what you can. These days, most online news sites are technologically so behind the curve that we can't build anything close to what we want."

Newspaper companies are notorious late adapters of technology. Little is more anathema to most publishers than an increase in capital spending.

 Sell, sell, sell: "When it comes to advertising, online news sites have always been fairly slow and not always competent trend-followers."

Look for ads that target information seekers, says Froomkin, and get those display ads online as well as in print, especially the local ones. Don't let Google take over the franchise.

 Take a risk, have fun: "Many established news organizations have made a religion out of careful incrementalism, and it generally serves them well. … But online news managers should be constantly asking their staffers for big, new ideas."

Not only do too many online news sites mimic their paper siblings, but they have adapted the paper's risk-averse culture as well. Cultural change has happened in reverse - the new media picked up the personality of the old. Be bold, not old, says Froomkin.

Links
 Online Journalism Review: Dan Froomkin Ideas for Online Publications: Lessons From Blogs, Other Signposts

Anonymous Mess

An one-the-one-hand-but-on-the other-too Editor & Publisher story reporting reaction to the New York Times' WMD mea culpa -- much of which lamented the paper's use of anonymous sources -- contained this paragraph:

One editor at a leading daily, who requested anonymity, said simply, "I don't know how Judy Miller can walk into the building today."

This is the ultimate ironic icing on a rotten cake. Have we journalists become so reliant on unnamed sources that even when we report a story about them we rely on them? Apparently so.

Hello E&P.; Pick up the clueless phone. It's ringing.

(Thanks to Romenesko, who had this gem in his letters.)

The Lesson from the Times

UPDATE: Howell Raines takes offense at the notion that Times editors under his watch "felt pressured to get scoops into the paper before the necessary checking had taken place" and argues (correctly, I add) that it is "unfair to single out Judy Miller, even in a blind reference, or to cite individual stories by other reporters without drawing aside the veil of anonymity around un-bylined editors who worked with them." He then names the editors.

Read it all on Romenesko.

EARLIER: The unsigned editors' note in the New York Times today about the flaws in its pre-war coverage contains one elemental lesson for journalists -- especially for newspapers concerned about credibility -- the quality of reporting cannot be separated from the nature of the sources.

Jack Shafer from Slate, who led the charge that the Times' reporting -- and that of Pulitzer-winner Judith Miller in particular -- on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction favored the view of the Bush administration and Iraqi dissidents who were using assertion of WMD's as pretext for war. In his column yesterday, Shafer focuses on the sourcing lesson:

The lesson of Wen Ho Lee, obviously not digested by the newspaper, is that a reporter should never get too close to a biased source. The danger is compounded when the reporter then talks to a second biased source whose source, unbeknownst to the reporter, comes from the ranks of the first biased source. What looks like corroboration is just confusion—or worse, a scam. From the poison tree comes poison fruit. (Emphasis added)

Anonymous sources are the bane of good journalism. They do nothing to help reverse the decline of journalistic credibility and provide opportunity after opportunity for those sources who see journalism as a self-serving tool to wield that too to suit their own purposes.

As Geneva Overholser has pointed out on many occasions, policies attempting to limit the use of anonymous sources -- or at least force reporters and editors to explain to readers why their using them -- have had mixed results.

Anonymous sources are necessary. Some are whistleblowers who ring the alarm of wrongdoing, others point the way through the bureaucratic labyrinths of government to documents that are better made public than kept hidden. Using unamed sources to identify fact and provide documentation -- in other words, a verifiable result -- is not only acceptable but laudable.

However, relying on anonymity as a source of assertion, especially if the only verification is that of a second or third unnamed source, damages the profession and undermines its core values.

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth. So wrote Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach in "The Elements of Journalism." The truth flourishes in the light and withers in the dark. If the only way to tell a story is to hide the identity of its source, then perhaps it is better left in the dark.

Traveling

I'm living on airplanes for the next few days. I'll be back next Wednesday. Until then, take a look at the Best of First Draft:

 The Quality Manifesto: What started it all.

 Journalists Overpaid? Nonsense: There are many reasons newsrooms have disconnected from the communities they cover, but overly fat paychecks is not one of them.

 No More Whining: He's wrong that penurious publishers are to blame for readership woes.

 Eliminating the Bimbo Factor: I practiced journalism, but I knew almost nothing about it - although I thought I did.

 Would You Pay a Nickel to Read This?: In the world of online newspapers (and other media), the debate over whether to charge for content (more revenue) or not (more readers) draws well-reasoned and emotional commentary from both sides.

 Newspapers Disrupted: "When you realize this newfangled thing is stealing your business, and you aren't sure how to get it back."

 How Journalism Went Bad: Reading writer Michael D'Antonio's thoughtful essay on the demise of traditional journalism (print and broadcast) in the L.A. Times reminded me of the Woody Allen line about death: "It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."

 Time for a Leadership Tuneup: Newspapers are like cars. They are complex machines that require regular maintenance, occasional new parts and a certain amount of high-speed driving to keep the grit and road grime from dulling their engines.

 There's Nothing Left but the Journalism: Quality sells. Relevance matters. The real lesson both the newsroom and the boardroom need to learn is that, in the age of the 24-hour scroll, the micro-fragmentation of electronic media, and the constant clamor for a news consumer's attention by everyone from the New York Times to yours truly, all that's left is the journalism.

 The Journalism of Complacency: Tim Rutten, who was completely wrong about Daniel Okrent (see my comments here and here), noses about for the roots of journalistic evil and finds it to be money - that is, the relative affluence of reporters and editors, at least those in larger news organizations. He's half-wrong again - but inadvertently landed on a point worth making.
 ASNE's Diversity Study: Looking for Answers: Why do America's newspapers remain so white despite 25 years of effort to have them be more reflective of the communities they cover?

 Money, Money, Money: The salary gap widens between the boardroom and the newsroom

 New Readership Study: Culture Counts: A new study by the Readership Institute - released at the ASNE convention - focuses on attracting younger and more diverse readers to newspapers and on overcoming the internal cultural barriers that inhibit innovation.

 Applied Talent: Howell Raines was right about one thing (at least) -- what counts is how much talent is at work, not how much is in the building.

Forget the Beast, Go After the Ducks

My latest column for Tomorrow's Workforce focuses on efforts to provide support and training to newsrooms' most critical component -- middle managers.

Here's the beginning:

The old San Francisco Examiner had a newsroom culture that was equal parts Sun Tzu, Homer Simpson and Hunter Thompson. When I became metro editor, my management training consisted of this advice from a predecessor: “This job is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Don’t let them get to you.”

That was many years ago, and the old Examiner is gone. But the ducks are thriving in newsrooms across the country, biting the ankles and nipping at the shins of front-line editors, quacking up a storm about budget lines, weekend shifts, seating arrangements, the company car and so much more, distracting those editors from what they were hired to do: Good journalism.

It’s not a fun place to be, in the middle. Bosses want long-term vision converted to daily reality. Reporters have needs and idiosyncrasies. The news beast is ravenous around the clock.

These editors – the department heads, the assigning editors, the copy desk chiefs – have the hardest jobs in the newsroom. In most cases, they receive the least preparation to do them well.

Read the rest here.

Must Reads

Don't miss these posts in other blogs:

 NewsDesigner on how the Dallas Morning News handled the Nick Berg decapitation photos -- none in the news section, but the severed head on the editorial page.

 Jeff Jarvis on the Berg photos: "I've been holding an internal debate on the use of photos in all the cases the Dallas editorial cites: the old, print editor in me is fighting with the new, transparent blogger in me. The blogger is winning. It's important for us to know what is happening in Iraq."

 Leonard Witt pointing to a Jay Rosen interview on Minnesota Public Radio in which he says bloggers who are credentialed for the Democratic convention should report as citizens and not try to replicate professional journalists. Jarvis adds: "Do not cover anything we can see on TV: not a single speech."

 Witt (again) on classism and racial diversity in newspapers.

 Dan Gillmor reporting that Larry Kramer, head of CBS Marketwatch, says Google News is not journalism.

Money, Money, Money

Dave Cole, a newspaper industry technology consultant, tracks the compensation of newspaper company CEOs and publishes an annual update in his newsletter News Inc.

News Inc. is a subscription product, but Dave said I could share some of his research. The chart to the right is a sampling of what Dave pulled from company proxies for fiscal 2003

Of course, these salaries (which don't include valuable stock options and equity grants - see News Inc. for more on those) are not as outrageous as compensation packages granted executives in other industries, and they must be viewed in the context of each company's financial performance.

(For a good example of executive compensation measured against financial performance, see this report and chart in USA Today, which was based on data compiled and analyzed by San Francisco proxy advisor Glass Lewis & Co., for whom my wife is an executive.)

For example, Junck of Lee Newspapers was awarded a $325,000 raise in 2003 (24 percent), while the company profit fell 4.8 percent and shareholder return fell 17 percent from the end of fiscal 2002 to the end of fiscal 2003. That's not much of an investment for shareholders.

Even more important is the the gap between rank-and-file newsroom salaries and those in the executive offices. Dave Cole calculated that "when you trim off the biggest and smallest companies, it appears that the 'average' newspaper company chief executive gets about $1.6 million a year." By comparison, the average salary for a reporter working under a Newspaper Guild contract in 2002 was $43,818. The CEO-to-reporter pay ratio in this case is 36 to 1.

(Of course, non-union journalists and those working in smaller papers earn much less. The University of Georgia's annual survey of salaries obtained by their graduating journalism found the average starting wage in 2002 to be $26,000 - a 61-to-1 pay ratio from the boardroom to the newsroom.)

Again, these ratios are much lower than the national average - 301 to 1 in 2003 - but poor salaries are one of the top reasons that good journalists leave the business as well as one of the major hurdles to attracting the best and brightest college graduates.

Dave Cole asks the question that deserves to be answered: "In the six years I've been keeping these records, that means that the average newspaper CEO compensation has increased 47 percent, even after compensating for inflation. Did your salary go up 47 percent in the last six years?"

Before corporate boards award more salary increases to news company executives, perhaps they should also answer these questions: Has circulation increased? Is readership on the rise? Is the quality of the newspaper improving? Has the staff of the newspaper become more diverse? Have news executives demonstrated an ability to innovate? Has newsroom attrition declined?

Free Press and Faux Journalism

The first duty of a free society is stand vigilant against those who would remove its freedoms. So it is also with a free press.

The public's right to know is under attack in the United States, sanctioned by congressional law, judicial fiat and executive disdain, and applauded by a public grown weary of the puffery of television news and the mediocrity of most daily newspapers or confused to the point of disinterest by the rise of faux journalism and its exploitive use of journalistic values to cloak personal or partisan interests.

That's why I was thrilled yesterday to see two prominent news executives fight back, to call for a staunching of the loss of freedoms and urge a recommitment to the values and ethics that separate actual journalists from those who just play one TV.

Tom Curley, president of the Associated Press, an organization not ordinarily associated with editorial leadership or progressive thinking, proposed a plan to create a media advocacy center in Washington to lobby for open government. He said in a speech:

"The government is pushing hard for secrecy. We must push back equally hard for openness. I think it's time to consider establishment of a focused lobbying effort in Washington." (Emphasis added)

Curley said Attorney General John Ashcroft has reversed "the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act." He said:

"The essence of the FOI Act is that government information is open and accessible to the public unless there is a very good reason to keep it secret. But under the attorney general's directive, department heads were told they should treat government information as secret unless presented with a very good reason to make it accessible. The agencies eagerly complied. Up went the barriers. Down came the official Internet sites and document databases." (Emphasis added.)

Curley also cited the recent incident involving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who refused to allow reporters to record a speech in Hattiesburg, Miss., and ordered U.S. Marshals to erase reporters' voice recorders. The AP and Gannett filed suit in that case today.

Journalists need to abandon their pretext of impartiality and fight back, said Curley.

"I know that some in the journalism community would strongly disapprove of a project of this kind. They believe the role of journalists is to remain strictly impartial, and that express backing for even the best intended legislation would compromise that role. I respectfully disagree.

"The objection reminds me a little bit of the saying about the man who was "so broad minded that he wouldn't take his own side in a fight." A fight is what this is. A fight is what our system of government intends and expects it to be. (Emphasis added.)

Joining Curley on the offensive is Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll, who, in a speech at the University of Oregon, attacked the "rise of pseudo-journalism in America." The college's campus newspaper quoted Carroll:

"All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism. They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated." (Emphasis added.)

Carroll singled out Bill O'Reilly of Fox News' as one of a "'different breed of journalists' who misled their audience while claiming to inform them."

It is the belief in and adherence to the ethics of journalism that separates the real from the faux in the field - and these ethics are as equally important to a free press as freedom itself because without them the public has no way of distinguishing truth from propaganda.

Newspapers in particular have an obligation to protect a full and robust interpretation of the First Amendment by government and the courts because they are the nation's largest news-gathering institutions and on many local levels often are the only source of original reporting.

For journalists, it is time to take sides - to be for openness and against secrecy, to be for higher standards and against mediocrity, to be for depth, context and an informed public and against information that is sliced and diced to fit a specific political or social agenda.

To use, again, a quote someone left in my comments the other day: "Where there is no sunlight many cruel habits grow and are accepted as normal ..."

It is time be for sunshine - in our government and in our own profession.

Links
 Tom Curley The Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture
 Oregon Daily Emerald (Univ. of Oregon) Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics

Going Public in Baltimore

The Baltimore Sun names its first public editor, Paul Moore, formerly the paper's Page 1 editor. He cites Cool Hand Luke in his first column.

Generation Thumb

Newspapers have gotten their inky butts kicked by television, the Internet, talk radio and shouting pundits. The next boot on the back page appears to be coming from text messaging.

"The growing 'thumb generation' posed the greatest new challenge to traditional media, with cell phone text messages conveying news, rumors and gossip, said Pedro J. Ramirez, editor of Spain's El Mundo," reported Eweek.

Of course, this is all about chasing the mirage-like "young reader," who, according some massive Italian study, dislikes newspapers for "using arcane language, rehashing crime stories already seen on television and wasting space by reporting on reality TV shows."

All good reasons for not reading, but I say let the generation thumb be generation dumb if they want to be. There are millions of adult non-readers for newspapers to chase -- and be caught -- with quality local journalism.

(TKS 2 LOST REMOTE 4 THE TIP).

Abu Ghraib: National Press Takes a Pass

Mike Getler, the ombudsman for the Washington Post, examines the Post's coverage of the reservists-gone-wild prison story and concludes the paper "did indeed seem to hesitate to put the story on the front page" even after 60 Minutes gave the American public - and Congress - the first look at their tax dollars at work in Baghdad.

The Post's post-60 Minutes story ran on April 30 - a day after the broadcast - and, says Getler, "carried two of the most shocking images shown by CBS. Yet it was placed on Page A24, and the only clue on the front page was a one-line reference that said, 'Iraqi prison gets new commander as part of probe,' which some readers said was so casual as to be misleading." Getler continues:

"I do not, at this point, have answers to why The Post was slow off the mark on this story other than points I have raised in other columns. One is that war, including the period before it starts, requires alertness at all times and to all angles of the news. That's a high hurdle, but there is no bigger story. The other is that there needs to be timelier investigative reporting. The clues were there four months earlier, on the public record, and they were put there by the military." (Emphasis added).

When I wrote about Abu Ghraib the other day, I said "newspapers must be more aggressive" in their journalism order to "differentiate themselves from the crowd" of media.

Connie Coyne, the reader advocate at the Salt Lake Tribune, echoes that sentiment, saying "reporters in Baghdad and Washington (made) "a poor effort in chasing the story" when the investigation was first announced in January. She continues:

"The Washington press corps has been accused in the past of having a pack mentality -- that they pursue only what they all perceive to be a story or what they can easily get without ticking off their sources and denying themselves access for other stories. That could be the case in this investigation. Or they could be less intelligent than they are given credit for." (Emphasis added).

Hindsight is wonderful, and as I get older I try to resort to it less frequently because every day there's more of it. I don't know why reporters for the New York Times, the Post and others in Iraq and Washington didn't ferret out the story and 60 Minutes and Seymour Hersh did. But I do know journalists need to do better. The first duty of a free press is vigilance toward those who would hide the truth from the society they both govern and serve.

As one person put it so well in my comments: "Where there is no sunlight many cruel habits grow and are accepted as normal ..."

Links
 Washington Post: Michael Getler The Images Are Getting Darker
 Salt Lake Tribune: Connie Coyne Photos aren't the most shocking part of abuse story

Abu Ghraib: 1,000 Words

 "… new details from the Army's criminal investigation into reports of abuse of Iraqi detainees …

 "… U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners …"

 "… the Army's Criminal Investigation Division has focused on these pictures, which may depict male and female soldiers."

 "… there are 'credible reports' that there may be photographs of the alleged abuse."

The above was reported by CNN on Jan. 20, more than three months before 60 Minutes broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos and Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker on the extent of the abuse.

Three days before the CNN report, on Jan. 17, the New York Times reported from Washington that "the top American commander in Iraq has ordered a criminal investigation into allegations that detainees at the sprawling Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad have been abused by American forces."

No details of the abuse were reported and the Times didn't run another story on the investigation until May 1, two days after the 60 Minutes report.

Vaughn Ververs raises this question in the NationalJournal.com: "The episode did get us thinking once again about how news becomes news."

I don't agree with Ververs that "there is more than a bit of false outrage on the part of those involved, as well as the media, about the whole story," but his question is valid, as is the answer he supplies: The abuse at Abu Ghraib became a big story when 60 Minutes broadcast the photographs. He writes:

"There is no way to overestimate the impact that visual images have on our world. Still photos or video, we've now reached the point where nothing happened unless it was seen on TV." (Emphasis added.)

That is, of course, correct for the more-than-half of all Americans who don't read a daily newspaper, but it overlooks the powerful impact of the printed word when it is backed by substantive reporting and displayed in prominent fashion.

If the New York Times had not apparently been content to leave the Abu Ghraib issue as a 373-word, Page 7, Saturday story, and had pursued and pushed it onto the front page, then it would have been a daily newspaper and not a weekly TV show and magazine who was leading the reporting on the story.

Neither the New York Times nor CNN followed up on their initial Abu Ghraib stories. I'm sure people in each organization are asking why. Newspapers must be more aggressive. They have more resources, more reporters and more space than any other news medium.

What matters most these days for newspapers is the quality of their work. Everything else is media noise. As Ververs says about the news media in general:

"In this country, there are three broadcast news organizations, three 24-hour cable news networks, a dozen or so major papers, dozens more mid-major papers and even more news magazines. Yet aside from feature stories on women's health or the 'Fleecing of America,' most cover the same news day after day, week after week." (Emphasis added.)

To make a difference, newspapers must differentiate themselves from the crowd. If they don't, they're destined to continue writing Page 1 stories whose first graph contains the words "according to 60 Minutes" or "Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker."

UPDATE: The Financial Times reports that "the US media was slow to jump on allegations of abuse by American soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison."

Links
 First Draft Digital Proof, Human Source

Digital Proof, Human Source

The media wary Bush administration's fears of journalists running untethered amidst military operations in Iraq and eroding the American public's will for war with gruesome images of dead and dismembered G.I's appears to have been completely unfounded.

The two biggest recent stories to emerge from the Iraq - the administration's don't-show-don't-know policy toward the photographing of military caskets and the puerile abuses by Army reservists inside Abu Ghraib prison - were based on digital photographs not made by journalists but by participants in both stories.

The photograph of flag-covered caskets crammed into a military cargo plane was taken by a civilian airport worker in Kuwait and the prison porn was shot by the abusers themselves, the reservists of the 372nd Military Police Company.

Reporters and cops know insiders make the best sources. Richard Nixon, Martha Stewart and even Bill Clinton (Monica was the ultimate insider!) were burned by the people they manipulated - the Watergate burglars, Douglas Faneuil and "that woman." Will the furloughed prison guards, truck drivers and community college hopefuls of the 372nd take out Donald Rumsfeld?

One thing is for certain: Digital cameras have changed the nature of news sources. What was once asserted to be true can now be proven (and, of course, manipulated). The latest batch of Abu Ghraib photos, published today by the Washington Post, was "mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by" the paper, most of which resembled "a travelogue from Iraq," albeit one with a side-trip to a wax museum of horrors.

The pictures were burned onto CDs and "circulated among soldiers in the 372nd," the Post reported.

Of course. For a digital generation of soldiers accustomed to Napstering music, it's no technology leap at all and not much of an ethical step to burn a platter of soft-core prison porn and pass it around. This is the world's most technologically-enabled fighting force, and not just militarily. The Post reports:

"For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets."

Imagine how quickly the slaughter of innocents at My Lai would have become known had it been captured by a palm-sized digital camera (or phone) instead of reported by letter.

What does this mean for journalism?

First, it converts all camera-toting participants of an event into potential irrefutable witnesses and therefore sources.

Second, these witnesses also have the capability to become citizen reporters (who may or may not attempt to "report" journalistically and instead prefer to "show" a version of an event from their own viewpoint).

Third, it further dilutes the traditional role of mainstream journalists as the primary providers of news. As more citizens become not only subjects and sources but also reporters, professional journalists are increasingly disintermediated.

The deflation of high technology into everyday tools usable by anyone redefines journalism's core function (reporting what happened) from the practice of an elite few to a possibility for many.

The linear nature of news - flowing from source to journalist to public - is disrupted. Journalists must adapt. Explanation and context and depth become more important as the basic "what happened" becomes more commoditized. Official sources - government and corporate authorities - become devalued as they grow warier of and less honest toward the news media; unofficial sources (prison guards, cargo loaders) increase in value. Assertion loses out to proof and the standard of fact is raised.

Ironically, what much of this means is that in a digital world, the human source, the one man or the one woman who was there, who saw, who heard, who documented, trumps all else.

You Say You Want a Revolution ...

UPDATE: Here is the Columbia Journalism Review piece on Moroney:

"Editors should praise — not punish — dissenters. 'Be thankful for the people who speak up,' he said. 'They are our best hope for getting it right.' Moroney’s “Fidel” speech lasted an hour and twenty minutes. He was preaching the causal relationship between high-quality journalism and financial health. In the final minute he used the word 'revolution seven times, and the crowd in the ballroom gave him a standing ovation. Many were stunned by what they’d heard, particularly Moroney’s praise for newsroom hell-raisers."

As I've always said, when you're too busy to write, use someone else's words. The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review contains an article examining the newsroom "revolution" at the Dallas Morning News (it's not yet online).

In response to the piece, James Moroney, the paper's publisher, memoed the staff with the "five principles of the revolution," which he called "the remedies we need to get us from where we are to where we need to be." They are worth remembering:

 Be intensely customer focused. (We had become too inwardly
focused and forgotten that we are serving our readers and advertisers, not the other way around.)

 Sense of Urgency. (We began to believe we were the only game
in town. We could take our time to act and to react. We can't. The
competition is at the gate.)

 Be Inclusive. (We lost our focus on the development of a diverse workplace. We must understand we can only truly serve our diverse
group of readers by reflecting that diversity among our own employee
population.)

 Carry Two Buckets. (We had become too specialized. We developed a "that's not my job" attitude. There are too many empty hands
around. If you have one, either pick up another bucket or use it to turn
the handle on the exit door.)

 Welcome Constructive Criticism. (We became too arrogant, especially in management. We thought we knew it all or knew it best.
Non-management employees and mid-level management weren't encouraged and rewarded for speaking up. Instead they were ignored or worse, punished. It's way past time for everyone to be able to be heard.)

Newsroom cynics are likely to dismiss these concepts as empty management-speak, but they are shortcuts that acknowledge the weakness of our journalistic institutions and offer ways to overcome them.

Here is another way of looking at them:

 Serving readers means doing journalism for the public good, being the watchdog. Serving advertisers means providing value in exchange for their money, which pays our salaries.

 Time is running out on relevancy. Urgency is a necessity, not a luxury. The conversation of news is faster and more compresses than ever. For a newspaper to participate -- and to do so with crediblity and depth -- it must be nimble and assertive.

 Diversity is good. Does this even need to be explained anymore? The world is diverse. America is diverse. Newspapers aren't. Who wants to read anything that doesn't reflect the world in which they live?

 Learning is also good. The one-person, one-job model of newspaper journalism is obsolete, made so by the capabilities of technology and the demands of a media market in which flexible, responsive organizations triumph over calcified, hierarchical organizations. Start with the Learning Newsroom.

 Change begins at the edges but takes hold in the middle. Train, develop and empower front-line editors. Enable them -- through coaching, support and guidance -- to implement the vision for the newspaper. The Readership Institute's latest newsroom survey concludes that newspaper's with an ability to innovate have engaged and enthusiastic mid-level editors.

Why John Burns is in Baghdad

John Burns, the New York Times' Pulitzer-winning bureau chief in Iraq, tells the New York Observer why he, and other Times reporters, choose to report from Baghdad despite the dangers:

"At least to speak for myself, I don’t think that bravery has much do with it. I think it’s the sense of being at the heart of the matter. Of reporting about something that engages the keen attention of just about everybody in America. I don’t want to sound grandiloquent about the position of The New York Times in American life, but there are many people who depend on us to report on what is happening here. We have to find a way to continue to cover this."

He also explains his hair:

"'Why do I not go to the barber very often?' he said. 'This may be an affectation, but it’s true. My father was an air force general—Royal Air Force. Twenty years ago, I went to have my hair cut in England, and in talking to the woman cutting my hair, she said that her father, a pilot, was killed with the Royal Air Force in Germany. And I said, "Oh, my father was there at the time." We quickly discovered that it was the same time. The following morning—I was staying at a hotel in the West End—she came to my room and said, "I want to show you a photograph." And it was the photograph of her mother and herself as a young child at the funeral of this pilot, and my parents, my father in uniform and my mother, standing on either side of her. And she said, "My mother said your parents were so kind that I wasn’t to charge you for the haircut." And I said, "I’ve got a better idea than that. Charge me for the haircut, but I will never have my hair cut anywhere else again other than by you." And I have not had my hair cut by any other person than that woman in 20 years, and I’m not very often in England.'"

Son of a Bush!

What gets said about and what gets shown of the war in Iraq - and who gets to say it or who gets to show it - was the topic for newspaper ombudsmen on Sunday, with photos of caskets receiving more universal support than a common cuss phrase.

Michael Arrieta-Walden of the The Oregonian took on the argument over publishing pictures of dead U.S. soldiers and came down on the side of the First Amendment.
His column quoted Paul McMasters of the First Amendment Center:

"The combination of Pentagon restrictions and press interpretations of just what the public will bear is a potent combination when it comes to determining whether the face of war is realistically depicted . . ." he says. "Newspapers, especially, have a duty to show all aspects of a war, its ugly side as well as its public policy side." (Emphasis added.)

Gary Trudeau blew off most of B.D.'s (now an officer in Iraq) left leg in Doonesbury at the beginning of last week and by end of the week B.D. was screaming "son of a bitch!" as a doctor sawed through the limb.

Some newspapers scrubbed the strip entirely (too much "graphic, violent battlefield depictions," said one), others ran it and got praised for doing so and some truncated the expletive ("son of a ...," gee, what does that mean, Mom?).

Minneapolis Star Tribune's Lou Gelfand didn't mince words in favor of publishing the strip: "Gary Trudeau is bringing the obscenity of war into our living rooms. His detractors would say it should not come in the guise of a comic strip. In whatever state it arrives, society will be better off."

Ironically, Mike Needs of the Akron Beacon Journal, which altered the words in the offending panel, used the phrase "son of a bitch" to describe what had been edited out. He supported the content of the strip but suggested it belonged more appropriately in editorial pages "It's unfortunate," he wrote, "the comic strip isn't still located on the editorial pages, where the itch to change the wording wouldn't have occurred. That way, the emphasis could have remained on what's really important, the casualties of war."

Finally, Elsa McDowell, Charleston Post and Courier, which also sanitized the phrase, said "a number of readers have made clear in their previous comments that they are offended by visions of war atrocities," she added that no readers of the paper "registered complaints about the strip's content."

Reporting on war without reporting on the deaths resulting from that war is incomplete journalism that doesn't give readers the full story.

How will those newspapers who thought the Doonesbury cartoon "too graphic" treat those inevitable veterans who return home from Iraq minus a limb or two? Will photos of these damaged men also be unwelcome in their hometown papers?

Bush to Journalists: Gotcha!

Jay Rosen wove an excellent essay at Press Think exploring the ramifications of the president's belief that the press -- journalism -- doesn't represent the public.

Rosen quotes a Ken Auletta article:

"And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that." (Emphasis added.)

In the comments to his essay, Rosen clarifies this point as separate from the partisan positions of a politically liberal (or conservative) press. Says Rosen:

"When Bush says to journalists 'you don't represent the public,' it means a bit more than reporters are unrepresentative, or their views unlike the views of most Americans. I believe Bush is challenging the very notion that journalism is conducted in the public interest, that the public's right to know depends on the press finding things out. That's quite different from "journalists are liberal, Americans on the whole are moderate to conservative," which is not the point the President is making-- even though he probably agrees with that too." (Emphasis added.)

At the root, says Rosen (again quoting Auletta) is Bush's belief that "we don't accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of 'Gotcha.' Oh, you're interested in headlines, and you're interested in conflict. You're not interested in having a serious discussion and, and exploring things."

Read the whole thing.

N.Y. Times: Off the Record

Here's a key section from Daniel Okrent's explicative column on why the New York Times is not the nation's paper of record - nor does it want be:

"Katherine Bouton, deputy editor of the paper's Sunday magazine, said: 'We understand now that all reporting is selective. With the exception of raw original source material, there really isn't anything "of record," is there?' Reporter Stephanie Strom noted that 'we certainly aren't the paper of record for leaders of the African-American and Hispanic communities.' Or, one could add, the Orthodox Jewish community or the Staten Island community or the lacrosse community or ... fill in the blank." (Emphasis added)

All journalistic products are defined by the choices that preceded their creation, decisions driven by various capacities (time, money, amount of staff), skills (reporting, writing, education), needs (standing in a competitive - or non-competitive - market, desire for suburban readers, revenue) and personal interests of the decision-maker (all that messy subjectivity stuff).

Accepting and understanding these limitations frees journalists from a reactive agenda filled with event-oriented "news" and allows them to pursue a pro-active path toward those stories they deem - with the help of their readers - most interesting or most important.

Okrent continues:

"Here's another way of stating it: In a heterogeneous world, whose record is one newspaper even in the position to preserve? And what group of individuals, no matter how talented or dedicated, would dare arrogate to itself so godlike a role? … I mean no disrespect to The Times, but what discriminating citizen can really afford to rely on only one source of news? And can't all discriminating readers contextualize what their newspapers (or television stations or radio hosts or Web logs) tell them?" (Emphasis added)

Again, this is a liberating notion for newspapers. Because they can't be the "paper of record" and because news consumers are increasingly using multiple sources of information, newspapers can reform themselves into whatever content configuration best suits their community (and define that "community" for themselves.) For some, it will be providers of analysis, investigation and context; for others, the local appetite may crave more "chicken-dinner news"; for those with integrated online operations, both may be possible.

Finally, Okrent points out that the oft-used canard to describe newspapers - "the first draft of history" - is "definitionally imperfect, sometimes embarrassing and almost always needful of improvement."

As the author of this First Draft, I know that only too well.

Links
 New York Times: Daniel Okrent Paper of Record? No Way, No Reason, No Thanks

USA Today Report: Dirty Laundry

In case you've been wondering why two top editors have lost their jobs at USA Today over the Jack Kelley scandal and why several more should, read the interal report written by Bill Hilliard, Bill Kovach and John Seigenthaler.

(It's here as web pages and here as a PDF).

I've excerpted some sections below on culture and communication as the underlying culprits that allowed Kelley's career of deception to flourish. As I was reading the report this morning, I was struck by the idea that, ironically, the disgraces of Kelley and Jayson Blair are ultimately going to be good for journalism. The forced soul-searching by the New York Times and USA Today - two of the country's three national newspapers - and the subsequent public laundering of their soiled dainties airs openly all the shortcomings of our profession and compels us to confront them.

Spurred also by work on newsroom dynamics by the Readership Institute, never before have newspaper journalists been so self-aware, which is the first step toward the change that is needed.

I've picked up the USA Today report past a lengthy opening section detailing Kelley's abuses and exploring the so-called "culture of fear" that kept his colleagues and managers from correcting them. Read on (all emphasis added):

"The effect of this culture, whatever it is called, combined with an organizational structure that creates walls between departments and reporting lines that divide management even in the same department, has been to silence the newsroom. In talking with reporters and editors, what we found absent from the newsroom at USA TODAY is the humming buzz of excited, disputing, energized reporters and editors.

ASNE: Blogging the Ethics Panel

Jeff Jarvis is blogging the Ethics Panel at ASNE. Here's an excerpt:

Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times: "We had a truly horrible year at the New York Times last year. ... "The scariest thing of all of last year for me... wasn't Jayson Blair.... The scariest part was that the people we lied about didn't bother to call because they just assumed that's the way newspapers worked. That's scary."

As Jeff says: "Amen and amen again." Read the rest.

A Fraud Flourishes in a Climate of Fear

Here's the lede on today's USA Today piece about the investigation into the Jack Kelley scandal:

"Lax editing and newsroom leadership, lack of staff communication, a star system, a workplace climate of fear and inconsistent rules on using anonymous sources helped former USA TODAY reporter Jack Kelley to fabricate and plagiarize stories for more than a decade, an independent panel of editors has concluded."

A team of newspaper analysts locked in a hotel room for a week with an endless supply of flip charts and magic markers couldn't have devised a more thorough diagnosis of the industry's ailments:

 Lax editing: Lack of standards, or unwillingness to enforce them.
 Newsroom leadership: Focused on process not product; looking inward, not outward.
 Staff communications: Competition instead of collaboration; department silos worthy of the FBI and CIA.
 Star system: Work only with the "easy" people; an inability, or unwillingness, to develop staff.
 Climate of fear: Destructive, defensive culture bent on perfection not performance or risk.
 Anonymous sources: Playing by their rules, not ours.

UPDATE: Hal Ritter, the managing editor for news of USA Today, also resigns because of the Kelley scandal.

Links
 The Hilliard/Kovach/Seigenthaler report on the scandal The problems of Jack Kelley and USA TODAY (also in PDF)

New Readership Study: Culture Counts

A new study by the Readership Institute - released at the ASNE convention - focuses on attracting younger and more diverse readers to newspapers and on overcoming the internal cultural barriers that inhibit innovation.

A presentation (6 megs) by the institute to ASNE is rife with stark, direct language that declares "your newspaper is in peril" and warns that "your employees - and too many managers - still believe young adults will read newspaper more as they age."

The institute offers a three-part strategy:

 Get into heads of your young and diverse readers.
 Move from tweaking newspaper to continuous readership innovation.
 Build organization with multi-year readership strategy that expects and rewards readership growth.

The study also creates a "Ready to Innovate" index that measures, among other things, newsroom culture and enumerates several employee-related characteristics that indicate a newspaper's willingness to take chances. Among them:

 Their employees are much more "engaged" with the newspaper - that is, they are not only present for work and performing to standard, but often perform above standard and are deeply involved in helping the newspaper succeed in its goals.
 They are better at articulating the mission and involving employees in decisions that affect them and the business.
 They provide more training and development.
 They have a higher proportion of female and non-white employees - and they are in positions of influence.

There's much more, including some classic change-resistant comments from a study of more than 6,600 newspaper employees -- "It's not my responsibility," for example - and interesting high-level points about how newspaper need to provide readers, especially younger readers, with positive readership experiences (such as the paper gives me "something to talk about" or it "makes me smarter") instead of negative ones (such as the newspapers "discriminates and stereotypes" or that it is "too much" to read).

Like all research, one conclusion doesn't fit all, but the Readership Institute is on the right track, examining not only potential reader behavior and current newsroom conditions, but how the latter influences the former.

They are a couple of slideshows up at the Readership Institute site. Read them. Have a positive experience.

Links
 Readership Institute In Their Own Words: How to Win Readers (Powerpoint 6 megs)
 Readership Institute Background notes on the study

ASNE & Blogging: The Script Plays Out

UPDATE (04/21): Here's Jarvis' take on the panel:

"The good news about today's session on blogs with editors was that there was a session on blogs with editors. The room was full; they're curious; they know there's something happening here that's worth their attention. They're still not sure how to relate to blogs and what it means to their business. But there's something here." (Emphasis added)

EARTLIER POST: I've been waiting for Jeff Jarvis to post on ASNE's blogging panel today since he was on it, but he might have been so upset by Bush's speech (or was it the BMD -- burrito of mass destruction -- he ate aferward?) that he hasn't weighed in yet.

So, here's the convention newspaper's story on the panel, which summarizes thusly:

Citizen journalism argument, offered by J.D. Lasica: “The era of newspapers ‘breaking the news’ to most citizens is over – even in an online universe."

Wary mainstream newspaper editor Tim Whyte, M.E. of The Signal in Santa Clarita, Calif., responds: “I think such efforts at ‘journalism,’ however, should be viewed with caution."

And so it goes.

ASNE's Diversity Study: Looking for Answers

Why do America's newspapers remain so white despite 25 years of effort to have them be more reflective of the communities they cover?

ASNE's annual hiring survey, released yesterday, reported that the percentage of minority newspaper journalists working in 2004 inched up 0.4 points to 12.95 percent - 100 people in absolute numbers. This can be seen as good news by those who for whom any progress is better than none, but even they agree the overall number is woefully small. Worse, the bulk of minority journalists are concentrated in larger, urban papers, while many smaller newspapers remain lily white and even some larger papers in heavily minority communities lag the demographic changes happening around them. (See chart for examples).

What is the problem? Is it a pipeline issue? In other words, are their insufficient minorities in journalism programs? Is it a pay issue? Are those minority journalism (and communications) students opting out of journalism at graduation for more lucrative starting positions in other industries? Is it a retention issue? Are minorities leaving then newspaper business faster than they can be hired?

Let's look at these three issues: The pipeline, attracting minority graduates to newspapers and retention.

Free Press: The Big Idea

Underneath the clutter of readership debates, circulation woes and lack of diversity, behind the baggage of tradition and monopoly, deep in the closet, past the rotting skeletons of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, there, in the corner, filmy with the dust of disregard is the Big Idea - a free press is necessary for a free people.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel economist, reminds us, in an essay for the World Association of Newspapers in advance of World Press Freedom Day (May 3), of four reasons why a free press is so important. They are:

Quality of life: "We have reason enough to want to communicate with each other and to understand better the world in which we live. … the suppression of people's ability to communicate with each other (has) the effect of directly reducing the quality of human life, even if the authoritarian country that imposes such suppression happens to be very rich in terms of gross national product (GNP)."

Giving voice to the voiceless: "The rulers of a country are often insulated, in their own lives, from the misery of common people. They can live through a national calamity, such as a famine or some other disaster, without sharing the fate of the victims. If, however, they have to face public criticism in the media and to confront elections with an uncensored press, the rulers have to pay a price too, and this gives them a strong incentive to take timely action to avert such crises. It is, thus, not at all astonishing that no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press."

Transfer of knowledge: The informational function of the press relates not only to … keeping people generally informed on what is going on where. … investigative journalism can unearth information that would have otherwise gone unnoticed or even unknown."

Formation of civic values: "Informed and unregimented formation of values requires openness of communication and argument. The freedom of the press is crucial to this process. Indeed, value formation is an interactive process, and the press has a major role in making these interactions possible. New standards and priorities (such as the norm of smaller families with less frequent child bearing, or greater recognition of the need for gender equity) emerge through public discourse, and it is public discussion, again, that spreads the new norms across different regions." (All emphasis added)

Sen's reasoning may seem self-evident to American journalists, who enjoy professional lives unfettered by interference from government and free from fear of death at the hands of those who disagree with what they write.

Despite successes by the current administration to suppress public information, the First Amendment and a host of shield laws continue to afford American journalists freedoms unheard of in so many other countries. This is why American journalists have an obligation to produce the highest quality journalism possible - as an example and an argument to journalists everywhere, and to those governments who would stifle them, that a free press is a fundamental component of a free society.

A lot of small thinking goes on in newspapers, much of devoted to the minutiae of the daily process. Let's not lose the Big Idea in the fog of petty concerns.

(Thanks to Tom Mangan for the tip.)

Links
 World Association of Newspapers: Amartya Sen What’s the Point of Press Freedom?

Applied Talent

Howell Raines writes in The Atlantic, describing the culture of the New York Times newsroom:

"For people who have worked at other newspapers, the biggest shock upon coming to the Times is that the level of talent is not higher than it is. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the level of applied talent. Very few unintelligent people get hired at the Times. So what's shocking to the newcomer is the amount of coasting."

Of course, Raines' Atlantic article is self-serving, but most autobiography is and simply because he portrays himself as a Yojimbo-like editorial samurai who, with his trusty sidekick Gerald Boyd, is intent on diverting the Times from its own inertia doesn't negate the ring of validity that echoes from some of his assertions. Remember, even the paranoid are right some of the time.

Even Jack Shafer, who portrays Raines as "bitter, conceited, and clueless," obliquely, albeit derisively, admits that Raines was probably right about slack level at the Times, but asserts that had Raines been a better manager he would have recognized that "coasting" is endemic in all large organizations and looked for answers that went beyond him being a solution of one. Writes Shafer:

"A sharper manager than Raines would have realized that what he was really observing was the Shafer Principle: 20 percent of employees do 80 percent of the work at almost every institution. Laud Raines for wanting to sack the featherbedders and deadwooders hiding behind Newspaper Guild skirts, but I'd wager that if you let Raines name his own, 20 percent of those employees would still do 80 percent of the work. It's an immutable law of the workplace." (Emphasis added)

And, therein lies the challenge facing most newspapers: Overcoming this institutional ennui and raising the level of applied talent, or, put another way, extracting the greatest possible amount of energy, intelligence and creativity from each journalist on the staff.

Within newsrooms one of the great obstacles to achieving this sort of personal fulfillment - and, hence, institutional fulfillment - is a defensive culture that discourages extra effort. The Times culture, he said, "actually consists of two distinct and parallel cultures, each fully cognizant of the other: the culture of achievement and the culture of complaint."

This observation holds for all newsrooms large and small, as we veterans of those places can attest, as does the cycle of what Raines characterizes as recruitment of new arrivals into these cultures by their standing members. Who hasn't seen a promising young reporter morph into a wizened, chronic griper after only a couple of years in the trenches?

The key challenge of newspaper managers is to encourage the culture of achievement and to provide an environment for journalists - at all stages of their careers - to grow professionally.

I have become increasingly convinced in the last few months, however - persuaded by interviews with dozens of editors, reporters and heads of journalism training organizations for a couple of projects I am involved in - that the greatest impediment news managers face to cultural change is themselves, especially middle managers, the desk editors, assignment editors and others with the most direct, day-to-day contact with the reporters and photographers.

A bright young reporter with two years experience told me recently that she is leaving journalism, heading off to law school, because she finds her editors so undemanding. Because she writes reasonably well, her stories sail through the desk and into the paper with nary a change while editors devote their energy to performing triage on more damaged copy. She is exactly the type of person - a graduate of a top five university, smart enough to get into one of the nation's best law schools - newspapers need to keep.

Another reporter, much more experienced and much more accomplished, with two decades in the business but still brimming with energy, told me much the same thing. He wants an editor to challenge him more, someone who does more than "flipping sentences," who will question the elements and direction of the story. For this type of critiquing, he turns to his peers, his fellow reporters.

One reporter described to me what he called "meeting reality," a world in which editors sell stories in news meetings based on budget lines they've written and then return to the newsroom to have the reporters "produce that story."

This is wrong. We know this. (And those anecdotes don't even include more actively destructive editors who view newsrooms as silos of fiefdoms over which they preside). It produces bad journalism and drives the best editors and reporters out of the business or into the deepest corners of the newsroom where they work with their heads down hoping not to be noticed - all of their talent unapplied.

I haven't written here for several weeks in part because I've been so busy, but also because this problem of bad management seems so large, so overwhelming, so systemically ingrained into the being of newsrooms that I had a difficult time envisioning a solution.

After all, if poor management is driving out the many of the best people (I'm waiting for ASNE to do a study of which type of people leave the business and where they go), what's left is a greater percentage of not-so-good people. Recently, a high-ranking editor of a large paper told me he was shocked by the depth of "mediocrity" in his newsroom and wondered if many staffers had the talent to do better journalism even if they had the inner motivation to do so.

This point is key when considering what type of training newsrooms should offer to improve the paper's journalism. It's not productive, for example, for a paper whose reporters struggle to report and write basic stories in a clear, declarative fashion - and whose desk editors don't have the skills or communications capacity to repair those stories - to send those reporters to a narrative writing seminar. Walk first, then run.

Complicating the matter further is the issue articulated by Raines - some people in many newsrooms (and in some newsrooms, many people) just don't work very hard. They are not, as my ruler-wielding, knuckle-rapping fifth-grade teacher Sister Mary Marguerite (now, she was an editor!), applying themselves.

Think about these things in a constructive manner for your own newsroom. What should your priority be: giving reporters and editors more skills or creating an environment that puts the greatest amount of skills to work? The former is a waste of time and training money without the latter.

Raines may have wrong about a lot of things, as his numerous critics have suggested - I'll leave that conclusion to those who know him and the Times better than I do - but he was right about this: Newspapers must change and change requires strong leadership, especially leadership where it counts in a newsroom, on the desk, by those editors whose numerous daily decisions not only shape the newspaper but the attitudes of the reporters they supervise.

"The day-to-day relationship with your editor is crucial, more important than" any type of training, one reporter told me. The solution needs to start there - with that editor.

Links
 The Atlantic: Howell Raines My Times
 Slate: Jack Shafer The Autobiography of Howell Raines